Exploring Learning

Legend Trilogy Boxed Set (Amazon) Legend , Prodigy and Champion by Marie Lu. He is a Legend. She is a Prodigy. Who will be Champion? I am a bit of a fan of dystopian fiction; it was Atwood's  The Handmaid's Tale that began it all, I think. Anyway, having just steamed my way through Veronica Roth's excellent Divergent trilogy, as well having just watched Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins second in The Hunger Games triology - I wanted more! A search led me to Lu's Legend trilogy and, it being Christmas and all, I treated myself to a boxed set. The hardcover books are lovely with tactile dustcovers  (these things matter in the whole reading experience). Chapters are told in third person but alternatively focus on either June or Day's perspective. Day's chapters are printed in coloured  ink to match the colours of each novel - gold, blue and red respectively. The story occurs in a post- apocolyptic  world destroyed and disjointed by immense f...

human |ˈhjuːmən| adjective relating to or characteristic of humankind: the human body | the complex nature of the human mind. • of or characteristic of people as opposed to God or animals or machines, especially in being susceptible to weaknesses: they are only human and therefore mistakes do occur | the risk of human error. • showing the better qualities of humankind, such as kindness: the human side of politics is getting stronger. http://bostinno.com/channels/the-history-of-education-infographic/ The final part of the E-Learning and Digital Cutlures course asks us about to think about the effect of technology on 'the human'; how it "works to re-define what constitutes ‘the human’ - for better or worse - and what that might mean for education. " http://bostinno.com/channels/ the-history-of-education -infographic/ This infographic suggests a history of (US) education. In twenty years time, it suggests that "the future will never be witho...

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."  Benjamin Franklin. Week 2's exploration for the Coursera MOOC, E-learning & Digital Cultures  asks us to look forward to the future of educational learning within a digital realm. Retaining our thinking about Utopian and Dystopian representations, this time we were to focus on the "sorts of metaphors that are used to draw comparisons between the unfamiliar and the familiar, or the abstract and the concrete" as a way to try and understand the assumptions made about e-learning - the digital ‘native’ and the digital ‘immigrant’ being one of the most widely used at present, for example. Sunrise, Singapore, Morning Run, 09 February 2013 A Utopian perspective presents technology as our salvation - transformative and revolutionary; a Dystopian perspective sees technology as destruction - as attacking and supplanting. Separation of the two...